We're heading down a road where large numbers of cars will be powered by batteries in the future. Aside from the cost of batteries (dropping fast), the main reason for consumers to hesitate about jumping into an electric vehicle (EV) in the next few years, is range anxiety. We are not suddenly going to develop cars with batteries in them which will cover 500 miles on a charge, so how are we going to cover longer distance journeys?

The auto industry is (sensibly) proposing a solution which meets the average driver's needs about 95% of the time. You'll be able to drop the kids at school, get to work, and then home again via the shops all on one overnight charge, which you'll do either at or outside your home. But for road trips and non-average commuters, a host of new partner firms (and industries) claim to have a solution to the range problem. Best know of these is BetterPlace - who are developing an electric car charging network in several countries, and who will provide roadside swap stations in Israel and Japan within a couple of years, where you drive in and a depleted battery will be swapped - within two minutes - for a fully charged one.

But there's another solution which falls between the standard eight hour overnight charge, and the battery swap solution. It's known as the "fast charge" and it's a term which is being bandied about with increasing frippery. We've seen a section of the emerging EV industry (both start ups and established auto OEMs) change their tune about this. Back in 2007, no one had an answer to the problem of how to juice up the car's battery quickly if you ran out while on the go. Yet just two years later, here's the stock answer:

What will the 2009 Frankfurt auto show be remembered for? While you’ve probably read it was all about electric cars, that misses the bigger story from the Messe show floor. This was the moment the auto industry got its mojo back.

Whether this sense of optimism is misplaced (especially when you take into account that scrappage schemes across Europe seem likely to end soon), only time will tell. For now, it serves as an antidote to the damp-squib of Geneva 2009, which was sorely needed.

Carlos Ghosn says "the time for change is now", introducing four Renault EV (or Z.E.) concepts

Back at the turn of the year, people like Renault-Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn were saying things like “I can’t even predict what’s going to happen next month, so don’t ask me about plans for 2010”. In Frankfurt, he assuredly hung Renault’s future on EVs, saying “the time to act is now” before unveiling four electric car concepts, and promising they’d all land by 2012. Whether consumers want them is now the 64 billion dollar question. Should the answer be a full-on no, Renault’s on a very slippery slope. If yes, its alliance with Nissan is extremely well positioned, backed up by its infrastructure partner, Better Place – who placed an order for 100,000 electric Renault’s on the first day of the show.

Alongside Renault’s offerings, BMW was a shoe in for car of the show with the Vision Efficient Dynamics concept. Pictures leaking out prior to the show’s opening didn’t diminish its impact in the flesh, and no-one has missed its relevance to the future of BMW’s M Performance division – previewing a future for high-performance cars in a carbon-constrained world. It’s a great halo car for the Efficient Dynamics campaign, too (which incidentally, is much smarter than the cheesy, over-arching new brand slogan, “Joy”).

What
were your favourite details from cars in Frankfurt? The vents on the
lower body sides of the VW L1 were far and away my personal highlight,
until I looked more closely at the door handles on the Rolls Royce
Ghost. But back in the real world, I was quietly impressed with the
fold-away centre seat design in the Ford Grand C-Max, a car that
otherwise leaves me quite cold. Aimed squarely at young families, I
suspect it’s a design feature that will not only make people go ‘oooh’
in the autoshow or dealership, but that they’ll really use in
day-to-day life - watch the video below to see a quick demo of how it
works.

To say that the seating layout in family cars is important, is as obvious as saying that cars need wheels. But it’s easy to forget that,
up until the age of about 20, many of us had difficult relationships
with our siblings. Certainly, the idea of sharing a rear bench for several hours
with my younger brother rarely filled me with joy, and there would
often be a spat ensuing before we’d got beyond the end of the
drive! So when the first Renault Scenic (the car that essentially created the c-size MPV segment in Europe) arrived, we’d pestered my dad into
buying one within just a couple of months of its launch – mainly because we
wanted separate, reclinable chairs, fold away picnic tables and cubbies
to keep our own books and walkmen in (no iPods in those days).

Ford Grand C-Max. Pity the name isn't as original as the folding chair design...

However,
the price of all that independent rear chair malarkey was that to fold
and remove them was quite a job (I seem to remember reading each chair
weighed something like 15kg.) – folding and removing them usually
resulting in skinned knuckles. So when Opel moved the game on with the
seven-seat Zafira, it invented a very neat seating arrangement termed
‘flex-7’ which meant you could convert the vehicle into a van, without
needing to take out all the chairs and leave them at home.

Access to that rearmost row of seats in the 7-seat MPV sector
remains something of an issue, however. In the smaller, c-segment
market that the Grand C-Max enters, the rearmost pews are only really
big enough for kids. Yet to get there, they need (and this applies to
most vehicles in the Segment such as the Scenic, Verso etc) to tilt and
slide the outermost centre row seat forwards to access the rearmost
row. Given that the chairs tend to be heavy, and the strength needed to operate the lever mechanisms
which tilt the chairs, this isn’t an ideal arrangement when small
people with tiny fingers are typically the ones trying to scramble into the back.

Now you see it...

...and now you don't

In
fact, it's quite rare that seven full seats are used in these cars,
typically it’s just five or six on the school run. So by allowing the
middle row centre seat to be ‘disappeared’ into one of its neighbours,
small kids can just walk straight through the vehicle to the back row
without needing to get mum or dad to perform chair gymnastics. Ford have spent time designing a centre chair which makes all this possible. As the back tumbles forwards
onto the squab, a secondary part of the backrest folds in, allowing the
seat to be compact enough to fit inside the outer seat squab. The
second device which allows this arrangement to work – and a critical
change from the designs found in the opposition, is that instead of
being secured to the floor, this centre seat is in fact supported by
cantilevering off the outer chair. Once folded away, what’s left is a clear gangway between
the two outer seats, allowing kids to simply climb in and walk through
to the rearmost row.

It’s one of those ideas that gets you thinking ‘why didn’t
anyone think of this before?’ But is a neat, if small, example of
user-research led design, where actually observing how families use
cars and spending time with them as they go about their lives has
resulted in something genuinely useful and new. It’s amusing to hear,
too, that Ford’s engineering and design teams aren’t above playing with
Lego Technic in order to help them work out how the mechanism would
work. We wonder if it was spending time observing kids that gave them that idea too.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 22nd September 2009

Disclosure: Ford is sponsoring the Movement Design Bureau's research work in 2009

There was a huge amount to see in Frankfurt, so if you're pushed for time and want the quick whizz-around check out my "Frankfurt in Four minutes" review video. However, on the off-chance that you missed some of the concepts or want to have a (slightly) longer look, I've clipped out some 2-minute long videos for a few of the key concepts. So, without further ado, here's the:

BMW efficient Dynmaics Concept:

Renault Twizy:

Citroen ReVolte:

Renault Zoe and the 'ZE' range video:

As with the four minute video, you can watch most of these in HD mode, so it's worth clicking through to Youtube (logo in bottom right corner) and then clicking on high quality mode if you want them to see them in full, clear view. We'll have more thoughts and a bit of indepth coverage on some of these, plus more Frankfurt coverage, shortly.

Just over one hundred images of the car, people, details and things that caught my eye during the first three days of the 2009 IAA Frankfurt auto show. Click anywhere on the photo to head through to the set in Flickr and then into individual photos. I've added notes and thoughts to photos where they seemed appropriate. Enjoy, and remember these are creative commons licensed, so you're welcome to reuse them as you please:

Frankfurt auto show is so huge that, even having spent three days there, it's hard to cover everything that's in the halls of the Messe. So here's a fairly personalised view of the 2009 Frankfurt auto show, edited into just four minutes. There are things in here that will doubtless seem strange to you, and there are plenty of interesting things missing - simply becasue I didn't get time to video them, but hopefully you'll enjoy and get a flavour of what it was like to be there. Note, if you click through and run this in Youtube, you can watch it in HD too.

Just in case you watched it and are intrigued as to what certain things are, then in rough order from the top that was:

Watch John Fleming - Ford's CEO intoduce the company's green technology plans at the IAA in Frankfurt. Like nearly every other major car maker, Ford was focusing on green - as you can see, this is what they opened the show with.

The headline stories were a battery electric version of the European Focus - once again, using a powertrain built by Magna (the ones who just bought Opel and Vauxhall off GM). Then there was the unveiling of EcoBoost - in 1.6l, and 2.0l four cylinder format. EcoBoost is a new design of petrol engine that gives more grunt with less cylinders and cc. We saw and drove the V6 version in the Lincoln MKS and Ford Flex recently. Finally, there was a fitter, sharper Focus Econetic, featuring technology like stop-start, bringing the CO2 down to 99g/km.

It says a lot about the pace of movement in the car industry right now that what might have been an impressive set of annoucements just six months or a year ago, seems comparatively pedestrian when held up against other manufacturers at the show. Most German firms have gone "stop-start", with smart alternators and low-rolling resistance tyres to boot, some time ago. And shortly after the end of this press conference, Renault pretty much hung their corporate future on the electric "Z.E." (zero emission) vehicle - unveiling four concepts, and saying it was committed, in a very big way, to the technology.

The Re*Move team decamps to Frankfurt this week, as we’re covering the International Auto show (IAA) which starts tomorrow. So that you don’t have to blister your feet, we’ll be trudging round the messe’s vast halls – covering the important announcement and vehicle launches, asking the tricky questions and generally shoving cameras where others tend not to shove them.

Primarily, we’re there as part of our ongoing work with Ford – and we’ll be looking closely to see whether there’s been any progress with Ford’s electrification strategy. We’ll also be closely examining the new C-Max, a European c-segment MPV, but one which signifies the look of the new Focus family, a car which will be launched in all of Ford’s major markets including North America.

Ford Grand C-Max images leaked out last week...previews direction of world Focus

Elsewhere, we’re itching to find out what Renault’s four (yes, four) EVs look and feel like, and will be paying particularly close attention to the tiniest member of the quartet you see in this plan-view picture. Has La Regie seen the value in the personal-mobility future city market? And is it going after BMW’s project i and Toyota’s i-Series vehicles? We’ll find out.

Renault's four EVs for Frankfurt, from the top. We're most interested in the far left...

Sticking with the Renault connection, we’ll also be talking to the team from Better Place to find out how their electric car-charging network and battery swap-station plans are progressing.
We’re also keen to learn more about BMW’s Vision Efficient Dynamics concept. It’s important because it’s positioning green technology, and green branding as a flagship idea which is synonymous with premium. BMW’s efficient dynamics programme has impressed us in the past, but it’s decision to make Project I vehicles a premium sell, and its recently launched ‘Joy’ brand campaign have left us flat. Where does Vision ED fit in?

Aside from that, we’re keen to field questions from the watching world. If there’s anything that’s bugging you in terms of news coming from the show, anyone you want us to try and grab, or something you’re particularly interested in, get in touch – and we’ll do our best to cover it.

Don’t forget all Re*Move material is creative commons licensed, so you can reuse and incorporate our words, photos and videos in your own publications. And if you want the intravenous feed of info, follow our twitter streams - @JoeSimpson and @Charmermrk (we’d also recommend @Drewpasmith, @carnorama, @ericgallina and @skymotoring if you’re watching on twitter), and we’re using the hashtag #IAATweetup along the way on twitter, and for our alternative designer/after show party on Tuesday night, which - we should point out - if you're in town, you don't need a VIP invite to get in to.... Here on Re*Move, all the material will be tagged Frankfurt. So sit back, stay tuned, and do feel free to comment or connect and ask us about what's going on. Tshuss!